I argue that Sartre’s understanding of needs is not inconsistent with his conception of the human condition. I will demonstrate that his use of the term “needs” signals a change of focus, not a rejection of his earlier views. Sartre’s later “dialectical” account of human needs should be read, in light of his phenomenological account in Being and Nothingness, as aspects of our facticity and situation. Satisfying needs is compatible with a range of choices about how to satisfy those needs and what they mean for us. I contend that Sartre remains true to the phenomenological roots of his work and avoids a commitment to a human nature or essence. Finally, I will address some of the questions that arise from Sartre’s focus on needs in his dialectical ethics. I will begin by examining Sartre’s early account of the human condition, and then consider his focus on needs in relation to this account.

In this essay, I offer thoughts on the constitution of images in art, especially as they are constituted in painting and in photography. Utilizing ideas from Gadamer, Derrida and Adorno, I shall argue that representation should be conceived as a performative concept and as an act of formation; i.e., as a process rather than as something “fixed.” My reflections will be carried out in connection with a careful analysis of Gerhard Richter’s painting Reader (1994), which is a painting of a photograph that depicts a female who is reading. I demonstrate how a close analysis of this fascinating painting leads us deeper into the problem of painted images, insofar as it enacts what it is about, namely, the constitution of itself as an image by means of a complex and enigmatic relationship between seeing, reading, memory, inner, outer, gaze and blindness.

The essay explores the development of sociobiology, its basic tenets, and its contributions to the study of human nature as well as ethics. It insists that Darwinism is more than a biological theory and presents a possibility of interpreting sociobiology as manifesting not the triumph of the selfish gene but, on the contrary, the only way in which the expansion of altruism was possible.

I will argue that “Continental Philosophy” is an Anglo-American invention. It is “Pseudo-Continentalism,” no more than a highly selective rendering of Western European Philosophy. Borne out of opposition to the dominance of analytical philosophy in our universities, Pseudo-Continentalism in fact converges with analysis in remarkable ways. Both are advertised as revolutions in thought and both stand over against the tradition of speculative philosophy; both repeat each other’s historical shibboleths about traditional speculative philosophy in respect of the completeness of reason and of reality, the priority of identity and totality, the predetermined fixity of teleology. What this amounts to is a common rejection of a chimera, which in Pseudo-Continental Philosophy is usually called onto-theology or the metaphysics of presence and in the analytic tradition is sometimes called speculative philosophy. Here, indeed, the analytic tradition is more radical: as I will show, it characteristically rejects any notion of a special kind of activity of actualisation as a feature of the real, whether this is understood as Being, mind, will, the élan vital, Difference, or the impotential. These are the vestiges of the tradition of speculative philosophy that are retained under the rubric of Continental Philosophy.

IAN ANGUS, The Pathos of A First Meeting: Particularity and Singularity in The Critique of Technological Civilization [abstract]

In this essay, I will outline the positive content of George Grant’s conception of “particularity” and clarify it by comparing it to Reiner Schürmann’s similar concept of “singularity” as a starting point for an engagement with the positive good to which it refers. In conclusion, a five-step existential logic will be presented, which, I will suggest, can resolve the important aspects of the difference between them.

Only in being pleased at what is done can I judge it as right. Kant is correct, nevertheless, that my motive is not the object of my judgment’s concern. In working to make a good judgment, it is not pleasure but the right result that one seeks. In taking the jury’s decision to be right, one is pleased at it—one takes pleasure in it. At the same time, it would shift attention from judgment’s proper object to find the point of the justice of the decision in one’s having been pleased